The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (10 page)

At no other diggings [was I] so struck with its order, propriety and comfort…The Sunday was strictly observed. A few parasols, veils and private arm-in-arm couples were encountered on our ramble. Many domestic scenes gave us a lively pleasure; as, the digger nursing his little babe, a mother reading to her children, family groups beneath bough porches, a roguish, tiny fellow pouring water into a plate for his puppy, a girl enticing a cow to be milked, with divers polka-jackets flitting to and fro in household duty.

It's not exactly Dodge City. Bonwick here imposes a pastoral idyll that historian Graeme Davison has called
the heart of England
, a rhapsodic place of cultivated farmlands and compliant social relations.
¹⁰
This is the antithesis of Dickensian London, with its crowded streets, hungry waifs, toothless crones and worn-out factory fodder. But it's not the American Wild West either—all knife fights, saloon whores and lawless degeneracy. No, Bonwick's new frontier is the staging post of wholesome women, whose
presence is the harbinger, not only of comfort, but of moral progress
.

Was Bonwick aware of any contradiction between this smug polka-dotted duty and May Howell's vision of independence? The English rural idyll would prove to have little in common with Victoria's sunburnt hinterland, and even less relevance to its early intake of remarkably recalcitrant ladies.

It was not only pious ideologues who were promoting the advantages of female immigration to the goldfields. In September 1854, immigration agent Edward Bell reported to the colonial government on the success of its own recruitment drive:

It will be gratifying to your Excellency to remark, that the recommendation of the late Lieutenant Governor, Mr La Trobe, that a large number of females should be imported in order to check the manifest disproportion in the sexes, consequent on the enormous addition to the male population which resulted from the opening of the Gold Fields in 1851, have been carefully attended by Her Majesty's Commissioners; and that the number of women, female children, and infants introduced, nearly doubles the number of males. The introduction of single men, except grown sons in large families, has been abandoned.

Bell's returns for 1853 reveal that 9342 females (of all ages) received assisted passage, compared to 5236 males. (By contrast, of the 77,734 unassisted passengers, 54,800 were adult men and 12,277 were adult women. The rest were children more or less equally spread between the sexes.) Demographic studies by historians have shown that this unprecedented pool of female government emigrants was largely drawn from small-farm and small-town environments, where extensive recruiting was carried out for young single women. A disproportionate number came from Ireland: between 1848 and 1860, fifty-one per cent of single immigrant women to Victoria were Irish.
¹¹
English and Scottish girls proved more reluctant to leave established family circles and stable domestic service arrangements.

Much depended on the girl's place in the family. If an older (or younger) sister could stay behind to look after aging parents, then a spare daughter might see herself free. Some, like the letter-writer ‘Elizabeth', became the family or village scout, judging the prospects before encouraging other siblings, aunts, cousins and neighbours to apply for passage. One lucky girl, who found work on an outstation near Geelong as a well-remunerated wet-nurse, wrote to her family:
I wish you were all here, there is room for you all, and wages too.
By such entreaties the process of chain migration began. Such refugees from the depressed economic and social landscape of Great Britain had no intention of making a return voyage.

Letters such as this one often ended up in the guidebooks for immigrants to Victoria that were a publishing phenomenon after 1852. These books recorded base wages for all grades of domestic servant and labourer, information on what to bring to the colony (mattress, bolster, blankets; knife, fork and mug) and, for single women, assessments of the marriage market. Of the roughly 7000 adult women who came as assisted emigrants in 1853, 4500 were single and 2500 were married. The average family size among the married emigrants was 1.5 children, which indicates the youth of the new arrivals: it was not uncommon for women of the time to bear seven or more children. A surprisingly large proportion was literate; only 2500 could neither read nor write, and this category included children and infants. (Even Edward Bell remarked on the unprecedented level of schooling among assisted emigrants.) Women were, clearly, making educated choices. The guidebooks, like the English journals of the time, were full of the
scarcity of wives
and
excellent matches
sure to be made in Australia, where
happy prosperous homes
could be created to erase the memory of
lives of struggling adversity at home
. The worst emigrants, all agreed, were those
genteel paupers
with
little money and much pride
. This for the simple reason that
the wealth of a colonist lies in work.
Similarly, young unmarried women intending to be brides but with
no experience of working
were advised to stay put:

The drawing-room accomplishments of singing, dancing, painting and crochet would stand no shadow of a chance against the highly-prized virtues of churning, baking, preserving, cheese-making and similar matters.

The above examples, and the letter from our happy wet-nurse, all appear in
PHILLIPS
'
EMIGRANTS
'
GUIDE TO AUSTRALIA
, written by John Capper and published in Liverpool in 1855. The guidebooks were intended to be of practical value but there was also an imperial agenda. Colonial expansion required skilled migrants, male and female.

The British Government wasn't the only party with an interest in Victoria's extraordinary new attraction for the world's voluntary nomads. There were fortunes to be made from the traffic in human mobility: the costs of relocation and provisioning, the revenue generated by labour and taxes. The Colonial Office paid handsomely to reduce its surplus population through assisted immigration; private citizens also boosted the bank balances of the shipping magnates who were quickly (and cheaply) converting their ships to carry people instead of goods. There was a middle ground, too, between government assistance and commercial travel: the philanthropic societies to which a prospective immigrant could apply for financial aid to secure passage.

The Family Colonisation Loan Society established by the enterprising Caroline Chisholm, the woman on Australia's first issue five-dollar banknote, is the best known of the philanthropic organisations. Chisholm's endeavour to populate the inland of Australia with honest and industrious women who could infuse bush society with
permanent prosperity
began in 1840.
To break up the bachelor stations is my design
, Mrs Chisholm intoned,
happy homes my reward.
With the discovery of gold, Chisholm, now forty-four years old and wise to the vagaries of life under colonial conditions, saw the opportunity to extend her scheme to those families which could not afford passage and did not qualify for government assistance (because of the age or number of children). Keeping families together was her aim. Over three thousand immigrants were sponsored by the Family Colonisation Loan Society between 1852 and 1854.

An alternative solution was for a group of eager but impecunious emigrants—neighbours or acquaintances—to get together and charter a ship. Guidebooks often discouraged intending migrants from looking
to patronage or poor law guardians, or
Government, for help
, counselling them to form local committees and
do the work for themselves
. The ethic of self-help was strong among some communities, notably the Scots, whose religious or moral code disposed them to
earn
the rights and privileges of prosperity rather than being handed a better life on a platter. Here the covenant was struck between the parish or civic organisations that acted as benefactors and the recipients of that local largesse; wealth would flow back to the community in gratitude for its faith. Alexander Dick aligned himself to the Christian and Temperance Emigration Society,
a joint stock association
, which planned to buy a 470-tonne ship that could carry 250 passengers and sell it at the end of the voyage. Dick characterised his fellow travellers as
an interesting and virtuous band of voluntary exiles…run by a coterie of goody goody teetotallers and Methodists…a kind of modern Argonauts.
Still a teenager, Dick was delighted to find that his ship was full of intemperate young men like himself.

Chinese immigrants also favoured the self-help model. They formed triads—a culturally distinct form of friendly society—to send family and community members to Victoria. Immigration agent Bell's report noted that
a very large, though I fear not very profitable, addition to our population is now almost daily arriving from China.
Up to 30 June 1854, according to Bell,
no fewer than 2895 male Chinese had landed in Melbourne…and as rapidly removed to the Gold Fields. Their women,
Bell noted,
never emigrate.
(Bell was equally dismayed by the high number of Catholic immigrants from Ireland, a country he believed was relieving
a parish of its paupers
.) Bell would no doubt have been apoplectic to learn that by 1857 the Chinese population in Victoria would peak at 25,000.
¹²

The majority of Chinese immigrants to Victoria came from one region, Guangdong Province, where they were largely involved in agrarian pursuits. Many were uninterested in cultural adaptation, even if the culture had been inclined to assimilate them, regarding Europeans as uncivilised and inferior beings—spiritual and cultural barbarians.
¹³
Chinese diggers hung together. They maintained close-knit social relations, both informally and in community organisations such as the See Yup Society.

Historian Anna Kyi has argued too that Chinese gold diggers can be characterised as having a ‘sojourning mentality'; that is, their aspiration was to amass a quick fortune and return home to their wives and elders with wealth and respect.

The Chinese readily acknowledged that this was their primary motivation; most didn't want a fresh start, but a way to improve their financial, familial and social status at home. But leaders of the Chinese community were also eager to dispel the near hysteria that surrounded the fact that no Chinese women accompanied the male sojourners. A petition to the government written in 1857, protesting against a poll tax on Chinese arrivals, gave an explanation for this situation.

The Chinese on first coming to this gold field thought the English very kind then the Chinese were glad to come digging gold and delighted in the mercy manifested. Now we learn that the news-papers complain that we Chinamen bring no wives and children to this country. Our reason is that we wish to leave some of the family to look after our aged parents as the climate there is very rough; our women too are not like English women, when they go into ships they cannot walk or stand and we cannot afford the passage money…as soon as we get a little money we will try to get home to our aged parents for our ancient books teach us that we must look after our parents.
¹⁴

Another ethnic group prominent on the diggings, Jewish immigrants, were among the first to grasp the potential of Victoria for changing personal and collective fortunes. Long debarred from full commercial and civic participation, Jews from England and continental Europe hoped that in Victoria they would be free to integrate with mainstream society without compromising their cultural identity. In September 1853, the Family Colonisation Loan Society sent a boatload of passengers to Victoria, including a large party of girls recruited by the London Jewish Ladies' Benevolent Society on behalf of the Jews of Ballarat. They sailed on a newly built ship, making its maiden voyage: the
Caroline Chisholm
.